La Huella, Uruguay

The best beachside restaurant on the planet isn’t in St. Tropez or on the Amalfi Coast. It’s in a tiny town in Uruguay. Hunter Lewis travels to La Huella to master the fine art of the South American grill

You can smell the fire-roasted meat long before you hear the tropicalia music or spot the chimneys jutting from the thatched roof. And when the restaurant finally does emerge from the sand dunes of Playa Brava in José Ignacio, Uruguay, it looks like a bohemian pirate ship run aground–a warren of dining rooms, decks, and open kitchens made of wood and canvas. Inside, a hulking iron grill casts a glow onto sun-kissed South American and European families, who toast the full moon and their good fortune with icy caipiroskas. Servers glide among them in Chuck Taylors, whisking wooden platters of grilled steaks, seared shrimp, and roasted vegetables to the tables. Everything is smooth. Everything is right. Everyone is happy.

Welcome to La Huella, the most idyllic seaside restaurant in the world.

“We’re a parador, a simple beach restaurant with simple food,” says Alejandro Morales, the chef at La Huella. Except it’s not. During January, the high season in South America, Morales and his crew of 40 cooks serve up to 1,000 covers a day. How many simple beach restaurants maintain their own bread program, partner with organic farms to grow their vegetables, and have a splashy cookbook due out next January? Where else would you spot a beautiful woman in a bikini and sarong tucking into a skillet of wood-roasted provolone while her kids play in the sand?

The owners of La Huella (pronounced La WAY-shuh)–Martín Pittaluga, Gustavo Barbero, and Guzmán Artagaveytia–opened the restaurant 11 years ago. The idea was to feed vacationing South Americans during the summer and the people of José Ignacio year-round. Soon after, boutique hotels, sports cars, and fashionable cognoscenti began to descend on the sleepy fishing village, which is a jut of land six streets by seven streets surrounded on three sides by the Atlantic Ocean. Over the years, the trio have brought their experience at European and South American restaurants to bear, cultivating an ecosystem that’s as much a way of life as it is a place for good food and drink.

La Huella: The Restaurant at the End of the World

During the off-season, the team travels abroad for ideas to bring back to the mothership. Morales’s mastery of asado–the South American tradition of cooking meat over open fire–is homegrown, but he learned to prepare paella in Spain and shellfish pastas in Italy. La Huella’s bread technique is from Tartine Bakery in San Francisco, and the idea for the organic farms came from Chez Panisse.

In turn, this culinary cross-pollination is now drawing diners from across the globe. Vacationing American chefs looking for that laid-back, Montauk-back-when-the-Rolling-Stones-crashed-at-Andy-Warhol’s-house kind of vibe have begun to percolate with tales of La Huella and boho-chic José Ignacio: “Everything at La Huella was magic, magic, magic,” says Frank Falcinelli, who took time from his burgeoning Frankies Spuntino empire in New York City to decamp to José Ignacio earlier this year. Falcinelli and his business partner, Frank Castronovo, globe-trot to research ideas for their restaurants. “But I haven’t seen anything at that level or that cool,” he says. “There’s no place like La Huella in the world.”

I followed the smoke signals south in early March, arriving during Uruguay’s Indian summer. As Bon Appétit’s food editor, I had also come on a mission to learn more about the asado. Not to overstate it, but fire speaks to me. I was baptized in the culture of smoke in the barbecue joints back home in North Carolina. As a restaurant cook, I harnessed the cycle of fire in wood-burning grills and ovens. And so I was at La Huella to become more fluent in the language of flames and embers.

Uruguayan cuisine has evolved beyond the strips of beef that gauchos once roasted over a fire. And the backyard parilla (grill) has replaced the open fires of the plains. Yet the asado–which refers to both the event and the act of grilling–remains part of the fabric of Uruguay’s culture, and meat is the staff of life. “We are grillers since we are born,” Morales tells me.

In six days–in restaurants and backyards, on the beach, and at a luxury asado at a new agriturismo–I ate nearly a quarter of my weight in succulent grilled chorizo, blood sausage, sweetbreads, kidneys, short ribs, skirt steaks, rump steaks, suckling pig, pork flank steak, and roast lamb. Meat is always served in this progressive order of the asado: sausage first, innards next, prized cuts last. Most of it was delicious, if a bit rangier and gamier in flavor, and cooked to a chewier well-done, than Americans are used to. It is in the context of this food, however, that you come to understand the soothing powers of inky Malbecs and the intense grape Tannat.

The days and meals in José Ignacio unspool in a reverie of blue smoke. I attend a backyard asado behind the home of La Huella’s Gustavo Barbero. His brick grill is built waist high so a man can look into the fire at eye level and feed wood into an elevated iron box called a caja. As the fire burns, coals drop to the grill’s floor, where they’re raked under the iron grill grate.

TRAVEL GUIDE

GO Plan your trip now: December through February is the summer’s high season in José Ignacio; the scene mellows in March. From the U.S., fly via Miami to Montevideo on American Airlines.

Tonight, Morales and Barbero roast a whole section of short ribs, called manta, cantilevering the grate at an angle so the thicker ends are closer to the fire. Patience is the key. The meat caramelizes slowly above the embers while also taking on direct heat from the fire in the caja. In the meantime, there’s plenty of whiskey and red wine, and Barbero sates our hunger with slices from the crispy ends of the beef. Finally, once the meat is a juicy medium-well, we eat it, unadorned, along with smashed roasted potatoes reheated on the grill.

The next day, the La Huella team take me to the private club that they opened last year. La Caracola is a dream of sea and sky on a spit of sand isolated from the mainland by a tidal lagoon. This time, Morales plays pitmaster in a hearth so large you could parallel park a Chevy Tahoe in it. He splays a whole organic lamb over a grill grate a foot off the floor of the hearth, then rakes coals under and around the grates. We drink yerba maté tea, swim, and talk for the four hours it takes the meat of the lamb to begin to pull up from the bone. The mellow embers–along with salt, pepper, and time–transform the lamb into a smoky, mahogany-brown barbecue that rivals any whole hog I’ve had.

As good as the meat may be, the seafood at La Huella is even better. Morales bucks asado tradition by using corvina, a thick, meaty, white flake fish, and leaving on the scales. When his coals have died down to a perfect medium, Morales brushes the butterflied flesh with melted butter and showers it with salt and pepper. Then he sears it, flesh side down, a mere six inches above the embers. Eventually he flips it and lets it finish cooking in its own juices. Back home, I now channel Morales’s beach-town patience, banking extra fuel off to one side of my Weber to rake under thick fillets of striped bass.

In bringing such lessons to the table, I’ve realized that the asado, like the vibe at La Huella, is not magic. It’s born of ritual and fed by experience and hard work. First you must establish a fire and a foundation of coals. If you feed it and tend it, the fire will burn bright and hot. And if you build it on the beach, they will definitely come.